rehearsal/performance

In residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2014, Ame Henderson and Public Recordings collaborators researched the gallery’s history of live events, examining how performance is programmed, organized, collected and archived within the institution. The project culminated in a 12-hour durational public rehearsal, as part of Nuit Blanche 2014, in which the group engaged a range of material and nonmaterial archival traces together, to consider how performance practice is remembered both materially and via collective memory.

The project used a public rehearsal process as a platform to revisit these histories by reading and working with archival materials and anecdotal accounts shared by artists with a history of presentation at the AGO and by AGO staff members past and present. Rehearsal, a common approach to creation in the performing arts, is the main strategy employed here to consider the history of performance. In-progress, unfinished, and most often not visible to the public, rehearsal is a time-based labour that reworks and rethinks an eventual performance’s concepts and materials as they come to form.

For this project, public rehearsal become a productive approach to a (mostly) forgotten performance history. Through the emergent form of rehearsal, the performers attempted to rematerialize traces of past performance events in order to open up a space for consideration and appreciation (for both artists and visitors) with a purposefully non-definitive and incomplete outcome. The working-through remains at the threshold of performance, in the interstice between the public and the private, the visible and the invisible.